The last five years have seen an unprecedented upswing in the number of enterprises moving their IT management and housing to data centers. When choosing a data or colocation center, companies have two choices. Carrier specific data centers are operated by a single carrier and provide services for the entire facility. On the other hand, carrier neutral data centers are those through which any carrier is permitted to offer services and compete for a company’s business. Companies are given the ability to choose between providers, switch at any point, or utilize different providers for different services.
The benefit of a carrier neutral data center lies in the competition between carriers. Each of the carriers operating in any given data center is competing for your company’s business. This gives companies the ability to pick and choose based on their business needs and budget. In the event that a business’s needs or budget change unexpectedly, switching carriers is a simple proposition because a company’s entire infrastructure is already being housed in the data center. Recently, an increased number of companies have started to use carrier neutral data centers to maximize the benefits they receive from the data center’s services, doing everything from increasing redundancy to ensuring optimal resilience.
How companies can use carrier neutral data centers to improve their redundancy
Companies have started utilizing carrier neutral data centers to improve redundancy, reliability, flexibility, and portability while reducing the overall cost of connectivity. Each of these uses is investigated in more detail below.
- Increased Redundancy. Customers require 24/7 access to their data. Companies experiencing outages that result in loss of critical data suffer an immediate profit loss. When companies are provided with access to multiple carriers through a carrier neutral data center, the risk of an outage that results in loss of data is drastically reduced. This redundancy ensures continued operation of your critical applications, even in the event of an outage with your current carrier.
- Improved Reliability. The improvement in reliability is seen as a result of the business’s ability to choose the carrier that best fits the exact needs of their company without sacrificing the heating, cooling, and security provided by the data center. With multiple carriers being housed in the same data center, companies are no longer being forced to choose between a data center that provides optimal heating, cooling, connectivity, and security services and a carrier that effectively meets their unique IT needs.
- Lowered Cost of Connection. Increased competition means decreased prices. The fact that multiple carriers are housed in a single data center and are competing for your business means that companies are now able to select a carrier based on which provider offers pricing and performance that best meets the company’s IT needs and budget. The end result of this new ability is a decreased cost of connection for businesses.
- Increased Flexibility. Each carrier’s network utilizes fiber and copper cables that travel a different route. Additionally, each network uses electronics that provide unique services and applications. Therefore, companies have started utilizing carrier neutral data centers for their ability to choose the specific cable, route, and application set that best addresses their needs. In a carrier neutral data center, all wiring routes and electronic services are available to a company at any time. This increases flexibility by allowing companies to pick and choose as they need to scale.
- Increased Ease of Portability. Moving a company’s web servers and IT infrastructure to a data center requires a significant investment of time and money. Once that move is complete, the goal is to reduce your chances of needing to spend that time and money again when you need to relocate. Regardless of how satisfied your company currently is with their carrier, needs and provided services change, and businesses are now utilizing carrier neutral data centers to eliminate the cost of relocating their entire IT structure every time they decide to change carriers.
Carrier neutral data centers and your company
Companies have started utilizing carrier neutral data centers to meet a host of needs. The bottom line is that these data centers allow companies to increase reliability and choice while decreasing cost. To learn more about the ways your business could benefit from a carrier neutral data center, contact the three closest to your business. Speak with each of the customer service representatives and then meet with your team to decide whether this is the best route for your enterprise.
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